JSmith
Master Contributor
Nothing like a hot cup of SINAD in the morning;SINAD is just as good as it gets
JSmith
Nothing like a hot cup of SINAD in the morning;SINAD is just as good as it gets
Absolutely. This article does not present any new research at all, nor does it pretend to. It's simply a summary of findings across a large body of work. In that sense it should be treated more like a secondary or tertiary source, not some new grand and illuminating information on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of SINAD. The papers this article was based on are all referenced at the end, so any interested individual is free to read and interpret them.
Personally I think @Mad_Economist has defended his position well, and if anyone wishes to harp on the contents of the article at this point they should at the very least do a similar level of diligence. That is, refer to studies that support their case. I agree that the title comes across as sensationalistic, but it's intended for a layman's audience after all. A forgivable sin, if you will.
... I can assure you that low THD+N/SINAD in your master AD/DA signal chain will introduce unwanted, audible non-linearity elements, which are difficult to deal with later in the process.
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I see a lot of people posting things like "wow, I went from this 110 dB SINAD DAC to this 120 dB SINAD DAC and it is so much clearer, darker blacks, smoother sound, etc".
How, and what sort of non-linear elements?
Curious - Don
Qa
Indeed. One thing that bugs me a bit is when I see someone who uses a SOTA DAC (say SINAD of 120dB) on SOTA active speakers mentions
"a bit of hiss when I put my ear close to the tweeter, but inaudible from the listening position".
Obviously, without actual measurement of said hiss, we can't say by how much it raises the noise floor, but I always wonder by how much that hiss would reduce the SINAD anyway (assuming perfect speakers, which we all know don't exist).
It's probably a good thing that the speaker remains the limiting factor.
Yeah, it was a strange discovery. Once upon a time, if I recall correctly, it was circa when Lynx introduced its state of the art AD/DA converter to the audio world and impressed not only us with its linear AD conversion capability, just out of curiosity we have performed some loopback tests with several of our DA converters. For one of our "older" DA converters, after careful inspection of the recorded waveforms of test signals (with Lynx as the recorder), we have found out that the mentioned DAC was pushing a mix of strange odd and even harmonics to the signal itself. After more experiments, when the signal was re-recorded again, with only the DA/AD in the chain (to prevent coloration from other mastering gear), there was a distortion to the signal which, when compared to the results from the other DACs, sounded kind of strange to us (hard to describe, but certainly not musical at all). And you don't want this kind of coloration anywhere in your mastering chain in any part of the mastering process. We have first thought the AD is to blame, but that wasn't the case as the other converters from the test group didn't exhibit this behavior. Of course there were obvious level / noise differences between the resulting signals, but no such coloration as from this particular DAC was there. We have always thought that this specific DAC sounded somehow different (which wasn't really obvious when we ran the mix through several other mastering gear in the chain), but mix of summed, non-musical odd and even harmonics definitely shouldn't be there. That's it.
100% agree with this. A bit funny that active speakers with noisy amps or ADC/DAC often get a pass but if those amps or ADC/DAC were measured directly they would be bottom of the barrel.
Michael
I'm afraid there's little help for people out there who still believe that a "poor" SINAD DAC would be sufficient to power most of the current active speakers on the market with high fidelity. If you want transparency of your current active speakers, I would definitely start with the proper source, i.e. the DAC powering the active monitors itself.
Indeed. One thing that bugs me a bit is when I see someone who uses a SOTA DAC (say SINAD of 120dB) on SOTA active speakers mentions
"a bit of hiss when I put my ear close to the tweeter, but inaudible from the listening position".
Obviously, without actual measurement of said hiss, we can't say by how much it raises the noise floor, but I always wonder by how much that hiss would reduce the SINAD anyway (assuming perfect speakers, which we all know don't exist).
It's probably a good thing that the speaker remains the limiting factor.
How does a “good” SINAD DAC help when you are limited by noise in the active speaker itself?
Of course if you have an active speaker with low noise / distortion internal electronics then a better DAC makes sense but that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about cases where the active speaker has audible hiss (and hence internal electronics with poor SNR) being paired with a “good” SINAD DAC.
Michael
I don't think it's that simple to say it like that - we are talking about active monitors with amplifiers with their own THD+N contribution. Of course we are limited by acoustical properties of the speakers, but that's another discussion. Think about the active speaker amplifying "poor" / distorted DAC source signal vs. amplifying SOTA DAC signal. I'm not a speaker expert by any matter, but I'm 100% sure that the speaker membrane will "see" the final, amplified signal from the "poor" DAC as much worse signal (in "quality" terms), which will probably result in audible differences at certain listening levels. Noise is not imho the only limiting factor there - some distortion products can be buried inside noise, while the other ones will pass through anyway.
Could be, never bothered to use it anymore after the discovery. We have used single tones and full mixdowns for the test and looked at the differences. That strange distortion occurred just after two loopbacks. Don't have the DAC anymore but I'm sure when measured now, that mix of odd + even harmonics would definitely contribute to lower SINAD, as obviously there was something wrong within the DAC.Thanks! Sounds like a poor antialiasing and/or anti-imaging filter was letting stuff in/out that should not be there... Delta-sigma designs can exhibit strange-sounding signal/noise modulation so that is another possibility. Whatever it was, I doubt it was low distortion itself, but a consequence (probably unintended) of other design choices. But another case where low distortion on a single tone does not tell the whole story.
I don't think it's that simple to say it like that - we are talking about active monitors with amplifiers with their own THD+N contribution. Of course we are limited by acoustical properties of the speakers, but that's another discussion.
which will probably result in audible differences at certain listening levels. Noise is not imho the only limiting factor there - some distortion products can be buried inside noise, while the other ones will pass through anyway.
100% agree with this. A bit funny that active speakers with noisy amps or ADC/DAC often get a pass but if those amps or ADC/DAC were measured directly they would be bottom of the barrel.
Michael
Ok, enough for now, hopefully we will put this debate to an definitive end...